Paul Levinson's Infinite Regress

reviewing Black Doves; Citadel; Cross; Dark Matter; Dept. Q; Dexter: Resurrection; Dune: Prophecy; For All Mankind; Foundation; Hijack; Memory of a Killer; MobLand; Outlander; Paradise; Presumed Innocent; Severance; Silo; Slow Horses; Smoke; Star Trek: Strange New Worlds; Tehran;The: Day of the Jackal, Diplomat, Last of Us, Night Agent; Your Friends & Neighbors +books, films, music, podcasts, politics

George Santayana had irrational faith in reason - I have irrational faith in TV.

Saturday, May 16, 2026

Citadel, Season 2: Here's What You Might Want to Know I Think About It

The wife and I binged Season 2 of Citadel the past few nights. I think it's a great scalding piece of science fiction spycraft with somehow some nearly slapstick comedy woven in via a new rogue CIA operative. As I was watching it, I thought that if Alfred Hitchcock were alive and kicking today, Citadel might well be the kind of streaming TV series he would make.

Citadel -- both seasons -- is also a special kind of love story, chocked full of insights into the way love plays in all of our lives, off-screen. There's a conversation in almost every episode in which Nadia or an equivalent character says to Mason or an equivalent character, you don't really love me, "you loved the thought that I loved you." That's pretty astute stuff, in a spy or any narrative, because it comes straight out of real lives.

Because of what we found out at the end of season 1 -- I'm trying to avoid spoilers here -- there's also a lot compelling and provocative family drama, probing the relationship between parents and their adult children. Since we're dealing with daily life-and-death relationships, the regular pressure points that we find in everyday life take on cutting-edge importance.

The importance of chips in the brain -- the key science fictional lever in season one -- is expanded in season two into a capacity to remotely turn anyone with an implanted chip into a murder machine. If this sounds like an update of The Manchurian Candidate, you'd be right, and that's indeed what one of the characters says in Citadel season 2.

Lots of people get killed, including some major characters, including one I'm whose death I'm very unhappy about -- but hey, this is science fiction, maybe a soul can be embedded in a chip, and I hope there's a third season in which some version of that happens.

lots of chips in this novel

Friday, May 15, 2026

For All Mankind 5.8: Firing on All Cylinders

Ines Asserson

For All Mankind was firing on all cylinders -- literally and figuratively -- in episode 5.8, up on Apple TV today.

The main action was the approaching attack on Mars by the Earthly multi-national alliance, and the defense that our Martian heroes mounted. Celia (Mireille Enos) and Leonid (Costa Ronin) were a good duo to mount the defense, and we get a better understanding of Leonid, his ethics and prowess, in this dangerous undertaking.

On board in the attack from Earth is A. J. Jarrett, granddaughter of the world-famous Tracy and Gordo Stevens, characters that I really miss in this multi-generational story (there is no else in the current story who have their unique mix of outrageousness, heroism, and sheer style). Jarett (Ines Asserson) is a complex character to begin with, and what happens to her when she gets to the Goldilocks asteroid will make her far more complex and conflicted.

Meanwhile, there's also a classic drama brewing with the crew that has landed on Titan. As we saw last week, Kelly Baldwin defied Captain Griebel's command that the Sojourner turn around and go back to Mars, rather than make the perilous landing on Titan. But Griebel doesn't yet know that Kelly did this -- he thinks the failure of the Sojourner to turn around was his fault, some mistake he made in the programming. He's determined to find out what he did wrong, but you and I both know that it's just a matter of time until he realizes what Kelly did. I like these kinds of powder kegs in narratives.

And just to end on a musical note: I really like Ollie's song, "A New Life," played twice in this episode. As soon as I can find a video of it up on YouTube, I'll post it here.

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Saturday, May 9, 2026

For All Mankind 5.7: Titan!

Finally, an inspiring episode this season -- 5.7 -- of For All Mankind. An episode that captures the essential quality of what we humans need to do to push the limits our existence, and through science and spirit get ever further out into this infinite universe.

[And there will be spoilers ahead ... ]

The set-up was perfect. The Mars settlement is continuing to destroy itself. Earth is no help at all, and indeed is making life on Mars worse. One of the two missions to Titan -- the largest moon around Saturn, replete with an atmosphere, and therefore a possibility of life -- has failed and taken with it its crew. The captain of the other mission, with Kelly Baldwin on board, wants to turn back. But Kelly has other ideas. And ...

The mission lands on Titan! The final scene of the crew standing on Titan, looking at the darkly clouded sky, was wonderful. We may call it a moon, because Titan revolves around a planet, Saturn, not the sun. But we're walking on another world, the furthest away from our homeworld of Earth that we've traveled so far. That's an epitome of progress.

I will say, though, that I wish For All Mankind would stop presenting communication from Titan to Mars as instantaneous. The same for communication between Earth and Mars. Since the show isn't postulating that in this alternate history in the 2010s we humans figured out a way to send messages across these enormous distances at a faster-than-light speed, there would be an inevitable lag in the communication. I understand that For All Mankind is ignoring the lag for dramatic effect, but I think these scenes would be more effective if they respected the laws of physics.

Back to the narrative: Dev may not have intended to hurt let alone kill anybody, but launching that attack against the Martian greenhouses was still unconscionable. I've been pretty much a fan of Dev up until episode 5.7, but I have to now classify him as a demented maniac with a god-complex. Given what happened, Lily did have a great idea for a birthday present for Alex, but the two would have been better off celebrating Alex's birthday is his room.

And back to Titan: I hope our team discovers some kind of life there. And if it's intelligent life, that it doesn't have it in for us.

And I'll be back here next week with a review of the next episode.

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Friday, May 8, 2026

Just in Time: Just Wonderful

I rarely review Broadway plays because, sadly, I rarely go to them. But my wife thought going to see Just in Time -- a musical about Bobby Darin at the Circle in the Square theatre -- would be a great way to help celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary, and she was 100% right. The play is a tour-de-force -- a wonderful and meaningful bio-story, with superb singing, acting, and staging.

I was two degrees of separation, in two different ways, in the 1960s and 1970s, from Bobby Darin. In the late 1960s, I sold a song I wrote to Irwin Schuster at TM Music, a company owned by Bobby Darin in the Brill Building. The song, "Unbelievable, Inconceivable You," was recorded by The Vogues, but never released. (You can hear it here.) Then, in 1972, I sold an article to The Village Voice about the return of New York DJ Murray the K to New York. Murray read it and hired me to assist him with his new show on WNBC Radio. Murray and I talked a lot while the music was playing, and he told me every time he played a Bobby Darin record -- which was often -- that Murray's mother had said that "Splish Splash" would be an impossible title for a song, Murray had passed this challenge along to Bobby Darin, and that's how the path to his first hit record began.

Murray the K was in Just in Time (played by Lance Roberts, who also plays Ahmet Ertegun, co-owner of Atlantic Records), Irwin Schuster was not, but everyone in the play gave sterling, memorable performances, chocked full of vitality and passion, and, when called for, humor and tugging on the heart strings. Jeremy Jordan as Bobby Darin is a dynamo with a powerful voice. Darin's repertoire went from rock 'n' roll ("Splish Splash" and "Queen of the Hop") to pop ("Dream Lover" and "Just in Time") to jazz ("Mack the Knife" and "Beyond the Sea"), and folk ("If I Were a Carpenter"), and Jordan does them all with a sparkling zest. Isa Briones (yes, she's doing a fine job as Dr. Santos in The Pitt on HBO Max) has a remarkable voice and all the power and Italian gravy of Connie Francis. Carrie St. Louis conveys a Sandra Dee with perfect spunk and sensitivity. And the band and the background singers were just right, a real pleasure to hear and see.

We also loved the way the "stage" is set, with seats all around cafe tables with patrons (who are theatre patrons not actors), two stages, and a band on two parts of the main stage. At times, Jordan asks a lucky lady patron at one or two of the tables to dance. Jordan, by the way, at the beginning and at times in the show, talks to the audience as himself, Jordan. Warren Leight (Law and Order!) and Isaac Oliver (a Fordham University grad, I'm a prof there, but, alas, never had him in a class) wrote the book for the musical. If you enjoyed Bobby Darin's music and personna -- whose style and multi-genre approach were a precursor of Billy Joel -- you'll find Just in Time irresistible and unforgettable.

And here's a song I wrote about and for Murray the K when I was working for him at WNBC Radio in 1972.

Tuesday, May 5, 2026

For All Mankind 5.6: Earth vs. Mars

Episode 5.6 of For All Mankind, up on Apple TV since late last week, was a middling good episode depicting the rising tensions verging on war between Earth and the human settlement on Mars..

First, Earth vs. Mars is a well-trodden topic. On TV, it was well explored in The Expanse. In books, Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy did an excellent job of it. The best part of this episode, for me, was seeing the role of the Soviet Union, still in existence and thriving in this alternate history. The kiss between Lily and Alex was also nice to see.

The ending of the episode promises an interesting stream with Dev now determined and on-track to doing something big to stop and/or surmount the escalating conflict between Mars and Earth. Bringing Dev into For All Mankind in the first place was a good dramatical move -- he's a wildcard, like Musk and Bezos in our own reality. All have billions of dollars, rankle under the yoke of governments, and have the power to march to some extent to their own drums. In Dev's case, he may not only have this power, but the wherewithal to impose it on the US, the Soviet Union, and the countries on Planet Earth. We'll see.

Actingwise, Edi Gathegi as Dev is a good choice to deliver the goods. And speaking of acting, Mireille Enos's Celia is by far the best of the military on Mars. There's also a lot of potential in the Titan mission, and what it might discover there. I don't know if we'll get a chance to see that this season, but I'm looking forward to more -- more profound developments, more eye-opening, brain-teasing wonders in our solar system, more than the ICE-like agents on Mars, which (as I've said in my review of episode 5.5) I've already seen more than enough of in our real world these days down here in the United States.

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Monday, May 4, 2026

On the Calculation of Volume (Book III): Multiplication

Well, I told you at the end of my review of On the Calculation of Volume (Vol II) that I'd be back with a review of Vol III very soon, and here I am. Volume III, unlike Volume II, changed everything in this mega-story, and was every bit as powerful as Volume I.

The key new ingredients were fellow travelers/inmates of November 18. Henry joining Tara was signaled in the teaser at the end of Volume II, and before Volume III is over, the two are joined by Olga and Ralf, and a new teaser at the end alerts us to more people who live over and over in November 18.

Henry, Olga, and Ralf arrive in the story at different times. Ralf's introduction is the most packed with possibilities. Tara learns about him in the first place from Olga, who is desperate to find him -- he went missing after he and Olga connected. I initially thought Ralf was missing from November 18 because he had found a way out, which I assumed made him unavailable for some reason in the November 18ths Olga -- joined later by Tara and Henry -- was searching. But he turns up, and the voices of Henry, Olga, and then Ralf give author Solvej Balle the opportunity to explore the metaphysics of loopism more widely than she did with just Tara.

Ralf sees his and the other three's endless presence on November 18 as a way they "can alert people on the brink of disaster". It's a logical and lofty goal -- if you know a car is going to crash in a particular place on November 18, you can prevent the crash by arranging for a road block on a subsequent November 18, or better, if the crash is due to something wrong with the car, by fixing it (assuming those kind of changes stick with November 18). Further, to do this on as massive a scale as possible, Ralf wants "to develop an interspace: a kind of high-speed bridge between the analog and digital worlds, capable of converting vast volumes of data back and forth with minimal effort, with no information loss and fast enough to save lives." A time-looped man with a plan indeed! We could use a "bridge" like that in our off-page real life world.

There are lots of other goodies in this third volume of Tara's adventure, including books by fictitious authors, focus on the city of Bremen where the four come to live (Cora Buhlert, a Hugo Award winner, lives there, too, and that's not fiction), and Raphael’s famous "School of Athens" fresco, which always reminded me of the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper. And I'll be back here with more as soon as I finish Vol IV in this magical mystery tour through revolving time.

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Friday, May 1, 2026

On the Calculation of Volume (Book II): Life in the Loop Lane

I just finished the second volume of Solvej Balle's seven-volume On the Calculation of Volume time loop series (translated into English by Barbara J. Haveland). It picked up where the first volume left off, but was noticeably different in its pace, emotional valence, and mode of story telling.

The first half was reminiscent of Canterbury Tales, as Tara travels around Europe, in pursuit of weather conditions and climates that mirror the seasons. This is a good idea for someone who is trapped on a single single day, November 18, happening over and over. But with the exception of a visit to her parents and a harrowing car ride in Finland, the stories Tara encounters and constructs are less than enthralling.

To be clear, the writing is sharp and evocative. Tara on her travels meets someone named Jeanette. "I told her my name was Tara. She didn’t think that sounded French or Belgian.... I didn’t think her name sounded particularly Norwegian either, but I didn’t say that." It's fun to read piquant little observations like that amidst the huge distortion of time, but I yearned to see more of the constesting of those distortions we saw so vividly in the Book 1.

Tara settles down in the second part of the book, but with the exception of the theft of her bag, we get long internal disquisitions from Tara on the hopelessness of her situation -- at times, I thought I was reading Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure -- relieved at least partially by the realization the she has not been "betrayed, rejected, forsaken", she can go back to her husband Thomas any time, albeit on the time encased on November 18.

The final part of Book II finds Tara in pursuit of all the knowledge she can find about the Roman Empire and its decline. In that pursuit, Balle has something in common with Asimov, who's Foundation series was jump-started by Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

There are five more novels in this series. I would be reading them anyway, but the totally out of left-field development at the end of Book II makes it sure a sure thing I'll dive into Book III very soon.

Tuesday, April 28, 2026

The FCC Raises Its Fascist Head Again

Here we go again. "F.C.C. orders a review of ABC’s broadcast licenses," The New York Times reports. Since ABC/Disney hasn't moved fast enough to fire Jimmy Kimmel because of his joke about Melania Trump being an "expectant widow" last week -- before the presumed assassination attempt on the President on Saturday -- the FCC is flexing is fascist muscles.

The Chair of the FCC threatened to do this in September 2025, if Disney didn't do its bidding and fire Kimmel because Trump and company were tired of Kimmel's delightful barbs at the President's expense. Back then, Disney complied, but correctly reversed itself after the popular outcry against getting rid of Kimmel.

Popular outcries -- they're in many ways the essence of democracy. So is the First Amendment and its insistence that the government keep its hands off speech and press. But Trump and his henchmen couldn't care less about such essential freedoms. The feelings of the President are much more important to them.

As I've been saying now for decades, the FCC, created in the Communications Act of 1934, was unconstitutional the moment it was created. In a major failure of our judicial system, it was never struck down as the blatant negation of our Constitution that the FCC was and is.

Someday, some enlightened Supreme Court will do that. Until then, the best we can do is resist the thuggish actions of this miscreant agency.

Sunday, April 26, 2026

On the Calculation of Volume (Book I): The Irreducible Metaphysics of Time Loops

Time loop stories -- about a recurrent, involuntary, often daily trip to the past -- have been well represented in movies like Groundhog Day, Source Code, and Palm Springs. This subset of time travel in science fiction and fantasy has been less represented in novels, which would make Solvej Balle's seven-volume On the Calculation of Volume series (!) (translated into English by Barbara J. Haveland) welcome in any case. But it has additional treats for the mind.

My friend Dirk Vom Lehn told me about this series yesterday. I bought the first volume, finished reading it in the wee hours of the morning, and bought the other three (vols II, III, and IV) that are now available in English. I'm going to review each volume as soon as I finish reading it.

Tara and Thomas Selter are antiquarian book dealers in France -- which makes them appealing already. Tara travels to Paris to buy some books, and that's when (November 18) the time loop commences. She wakes up the next morning, and discovers that the rest of the world around her is waking up on November 18. When she returns home, she finds that Thomas is with the rest of the world. They're living their lives in a world in which the days progress as they do for you and me. Tara lives through November 18 over and over, and we're off and running.

As is the case with most other time loop stories, Tara has the advantage of knowing what's going to happen, hour by hour, minute by minute, as she lives in November 18 every day. And of course, as is also the case with most other time loop stories, this advantage soon become a burden and a curse. This sets up the heart of the story, as Tara struggles to understand what is going on, so she can surmount the steel grip of the time loop.

She tells Thomas what's happening -- the same story plus what happened on the previous day -- and he by and large tries to help. They visit a library to read up "on parallel universes and multiple worlds". (I wondered if that library had a copy of It's Real Life: An Alternate History of The Beatles?) But the metaphysics of time loops, fun as they may be for the reader, are a kind of hell for the character. Tara struggles to understand what's up. But nothing adds up. Her hair grows, because her body is progressing even as the world is on daily replay -- and she notes "I cut my nails, or rather, I cut them again, slowly, over the sink in the bathroom, because they had grown, as if time existed and I was snipping tiny slivers of time into the sink, then I turned on the faucet and washed them down the drain" -- but other things in the November 18 world keep reappearing, exactly as they were/are, and still other items get consumed and disappear. And those vexing inconsistencies resist being washed down the drain or anywhere.

I don't know if Solvej Balle intended to write a seven-volume series when she wrote the first volume, but such metaphysical complexities are grist for the mill of multiple volumes, and I'll be back here with my review of the second and succeeding volumes as soon as I've had the pleasure of reading them.

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Friday, April 24, 2026

For All Mankind 5.5: ICE on Mars

Well, I have mixed feelings again about the latest episode -- 5.5 -- of For All Mankind, up on Apple TV today. On the one hand, it's crucial to speak out against the murders and general brutality that ICE has meted out in its treatment of protestors in our reality right now in the USA. I give The Pitt on HBO Max high marks for integrating into its narrative the manhandling and arrest of a health-care worker who dared to stand up to the ICE agents who were interfering with the treatment of someone they had brought into the ER. But that was just one thread in a complex, multifaceted story, the rest of which had no relation to ICE.

In For All Mankind 5.5, we're treated to a full-scale attack on the "Mars is Ours" protestors on the Red Planet. It's ordered by the current Governor of Mars -- Leonid Polivanov (Lenya, a former Soviet cosmonaut, played by Costa Ronin, who portrayed a KGB operative in The Americans), and is reminiscent of both the British attack on America in the Revolutionary War, and the current depredations of Federal agents in the past months in our own country. (This happens in For All Mankind after we and the protestors are reminded in episode 5.3 that the First Amendment doesn't apply on Mars.) From a political point of view, I was glad to see this reminder of the attack on our freedoms that is going on right now. It's necessary to keep these attacks on our democracy front and center, by all means possible.

But that doesn't mean I enjoyed the episode, and this part of its alternate history. It was fun to see Ted Kennedy elected President (no Chappaquiddick), and John Lennon not assassinated. And I know that for an alternate history to be believable, it can't be all a bed of roses. So episode 5.5 deserves credit for that, in addition to reminding us of the ongoing fascist attacks on our democracy. But after watching protestors beaten senseless on Mars, I nonetheless hope there are more brighter interludes in outer space in this series.

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Saturday, April 18, 2026

For All Mankind 5.4: Robots Replacing Us in Space?

Well, I didn't like For All Mankind 5.4 much at all. I'll you why after I alert you to spoilers:

[There will be spoilers ahead ... ]

The big reveal in episode 5.4 of For All Mankind is that Dev is on a path of replacing we humans with robots in our presence on Mars and movement further out in space.

In our reality, critics of our space programs have been saying since the Apollo successes in the late 1960s that a more economic and safer way of extending our species and civilization out in space is via robot surrogates. I've been thinking and saying for years that robots don't have the emotional subtlety to appreciate what humans see and feel off this planet. The recent Artemis II return to the Moon brought home that essential point. As Janet Sayyed back here on Earth noted, "Missions like Artemis II, which require long-duration habitation and hands-on scientific work, depend on that kind of flexibility, the kind no machine can fully replicate." That's certainly the case for our current AI and technology.

Of course, For All Mankind is alternate history, so what's wrong that it hypothesizing that in the alternate timeline, we have indeed developed the kind of robots that have our human subtlety, in 2012 and ensuing years? Well, nothing's wrong with that, from a dramatic point of view, if a foundation has been established that in this alternate history, AI and robots have become so advanced in 2012+. But Dev's plan is a complete surprise.

Even worse, however, is why the creators of For All Mankind have chosen this path? If it's all just a set-up to see Dev and his plan defeated, then I guess it's ok. There's no doubt that, in our reality, our journey off this planet has been slowed and interrupted by all kinds of ideational obstacles. So I'll reserve ultimate judgement until we see how Dev's plan plays out. In the meantime, I'll confine myself to complaining that I didn't particular enjoy this episode after the revelation of what Dev's up to, after I was already disappointed that Ed Baldwin didn't live a little longer.

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Friday, April 17, 2026

Memory of a Killer: Hit Man with a Heart

I rarely review TV series on old-fashioned broadcast television, and even more rarely on Fox. But Memory of a Killer is a worthy exception.

Part of its power is acting. Patrick Dempsey, who established his creds on Grey’s Anatomy (my wife has been a devoted fan for its umpteen seasons) and was excellent last year in Dexter: Original Sin, was great in the lead role of Angelo Doyle, a hit man suffering from the early symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Michael Imperioli, one of the many standouts on The Sopranos, was good to see as Angelo’s boss/senior partner. And Odeya Rush, whom I probably saw on Curb Your Enthusiasm and Law & Order: SVU, was refreshing as Angelo’s pregnant daughter Maria.

The Dexter connection is especially relevant. I've been an avid fan since the series began in 2006, and I put the series and its sequels (and one prequel) in the top 5 of all TV series ever. The key to Dexter Morgan's appeal is that he's a serial killer of serial killers and other monstrous people who deserve to die, but our police and legal system have for some reason missed. Angelo doesn't get quite the same pleasure from his work, but also takes pride in his victims being people who deserve to die.

[And there will be spoilers ahead ... ]

His unknowingly killing someone who did not deserve to die sets up the central thrilling tension of the series: the victim's mother Linda Grant (well played by Gina Torres from The Matrix sequels) is an FBI agent, and she's determined to kill not only Angelo's beloved wife, which Grant makes sure happens, but his brother Mike and daughter Maria. This turns the tables on the serial killer narrative, making the hit man's loved ones the target, and is a nice piece of storytelling,

The other leg of story, a hit man with the onset of Alzheimer’s, is also very effectively told. Angelo's brother Mike has a much more advanced condition, which adds the heart-rending element of letting us and Angelo know where he's headed. The series has been renewed for a second season, so we'll get to see some of that, and, optimist that I am, I'm hoping that Angelo finds a treatment that will further delay the progression of this crushing illness.

Saturday, April 11, 2026

Which President Was Most Responsible for the Artemis Project?

The Orion spacecraft during trans-lunar injection, to bring an Artemis mission to the moon. (Image credit: NASA)

The short answer, much as it pains me to say this, is that our current President, Donald Trump, is the President most responsible for the Artemis Project. My readers will know how strongly I have opposed and criticized Trump's policies in his two administrations, on immigration, ICE, just talking about destroying Iranian civilization, and just about everything else. But a key factor in Trump's policies is his disregard for the truth. And the truth is that the Artemis Project was initiated in Trump's first administration, enacted with the uncrewed Artemis I in Joe Biden's administration, and furthered with the human trip around the Moon just completed by Artemis II, in the current second Trump administration. The truth therefore is that Trump is the President who was most responsible for Artemis.

There's of course a history to all this. As I outlined in several books -- Realspace: The Fate of Physical Presence On and Off Planet and Touching the Face of the Cosmos: On the Intersection of Space Travel and Religion -- Richard Nixon, a Republican, stopped trips to the Moon in the space program, dropped them like a hot potato, after the extraordinary success of the Apollo Program in 1961-1972, because it heralded the vision of John F. Kennedy, a Democrat, who beat Nixon in the 1960 election and ignited NASA and the US space program after its slow start in the 1950s under Republican Dwight Eisenhower. By the time we got to the 1980s, Democrats like Walter Mondale were active opponents of spending money on space, and Ronald Reagan and the Republicans had become the champions of extending our species off this planet. That reversal continued into the first Trump administration. Democrat Bill Clinton did little for space. Republican George W. Bush started the Vision for Space Program in 2004, which included the Constellation initiative, a vehicle aimed at returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020 as a stepping stone to Mars. Democrat Barack Obama ended the Constellation in 2010, which almost made me sorry I voted for him.

This history is important, because it spotlights the significance of Joe Biden's strong support for Artemis in his one term in office. That crucial support makes Biden the first Democratic President to fully support the space program -- specifically, getting human beings to actual moons and worlds beyond this planet -- since LBJ in the 1960s. When the history of how the human species went out into the universe is someday written, it will show that we Americans, supported by both parties, led the way. And if Donald Trump was a crucial factor and force in that success, so be it.

That doesn't mean that we have to support Trump and his dangerous policies that threaten our very democracy. But it does mean that we have to stand up for the truth, which in just about every other aspect of his presidency, Trump disdains.

Friday, April 10, 2026

For All Mankind 5.3: The Newton, The First Amendment, and ... Last Breath

A powerful episode 5.3 of For All Mankind up last night, percolating with all kinds of gleaming details, as befits a series ultimately about the cosmos:

There was a nice alternate history touch with talk of the "Newton," which Apple released in our reality with great fanfare in 1993, promoted as the first "Personal Digital Assistant," but discontinued in 1998.

Defense of the First Amendment, as my readers and students well know, is one of my primary issues in our reality. It was therefore gratifying to hear one of the protestors say, as she was being arrested by the police thugs on Mars, "We have the right to protest -- it's the First Amendment!" But much as this was welcome, the cop's response was all too true: "This isn't America -- there is no First Amendment". And, indeed, no country other than the United States has the ironclad protections of free expression from government interferences prescribed in our First Amendment (even though they're often ignored, as tragically seen in the past year, as our own Federal thugs outrightly murdered Renée Good, Alex Pretti, and who knows how many others who dared to exercise their First Amendment right "peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"). But the cop on Mars who said only America has this kind First Amendment was, unfortunately, right. Even our neighbor to the north doesn't have it. I once was explaining the First Amendment in an interview on the CBC, and the interviewer replied, "Well, we don't worship the First Amendment" -- a sad but true acknowledgment, even though support of the First Amendment is a matter of logic, and democracy, not faith.

As I've said before when talking or writing about alternate history, in order for it to be convincing, it needs to have salient elements of reality in evidence. I thus was glad to see Starbuck's and Domino's Pizza insignias in the Martian marketplace.

Elvis singing "Love Me Tender" was good to hear.

And Baldwin and Gordo in their much younger days was good to see, but--

Did Baldwin take his last breath in the end? I have a firm principle in watching TV series and movies: unless the character's head is blown off, I think there's a chance the character survives. Now, I suppose if Baldwin doesn't survive in his human form, his mind might already be embedded in some AI -- after all, For All Mankind is science fiction. But I'm still thinking that we haven't seen the last of old Baldwin in his human form.

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"challenging fun"
- Entertainment Weekly

e-mail received from a reader:
Dear Paul, I just dreamed of airships flying between raindrops. I just returned from 2042 CE, where I sold my hardcover copy of The Plot to Save Socrates for seventy million Neo-Euros, because it had your response to this e-mail from way back in 2007 scotch-taped onto the inside of the cover. A Paul Levinson collector paid top Neo-Euro, because of the authentic archaic e-mail printout from you. It turns out that not many of your e-mails from before your tenure as CEO of HBO/Cinemax and terms as United Nations Secretary General will survive that far into the future. So, please respond to this e-mail, to help found my great-grandchildren's fortune. My Will will stipulate that they must share with your great grandchildren. Thanks! Tom

I of course happily replied...

42 reviews of The Plot to Save Socrates!